LATELY THE WORD SOLIDARITY seems to slip desperately out of the mouths of everyone I encounter. We need to be in solidarity. We need to come together.We can’t let this happen. The this being any number of horrible things we are all slack-jawed watching happen.

American democracy is under threat, and the institutions we thought would protect us appear to be either complicit or intimidated. It’s up to us. The future depends on harnessing our collective outrage into something powerful enough to contend with the corporate, political, and seemingly amoral forces reshaping our world. The lives of so many innocent people depend on this as well.

Yet in some ways, solidarity feels more out of reach than ever. The antithesis of solidarity is division, and we’ve never been more divided. Solidarity requires that we find commonality with those who we perhaps don’t identify with at all, that we feel their problems as urgently as we might feel our own. In contrast, it also requires that we tolerate that which makes us different, the things we don’t agree on. Those are easy words to write, but harder to stomach when that might mean standing in solidarity with someone while also disagreeing on issues like abortion, genocide, trans rights, or vaccines.

It’s a tall order: to stand together, we must amplify our similarities and overlook our differences. And perhaps look up from our phones. Some days, just the phone part feels impossible.

Naomi R Williams and Sarah Schulman have devoted their careers to the study of solidarity. Together, we discussed what this moment requires of us, why we must look to the past to strategically prepare for the present, and the very unexpected song that serves as a perfect solidarity analogy.

—Emma Pattee

Emma Pattee: This interview is very prescient for me because a couple of weeks ago I signed on to the Writers Against the War on Gaza boycott of the New York Times, and then about an hour later, I discovered that my writing had been selected to be published in the Times’ Modern Love column, an enormous career goal of mine. And I
immediately started making all sorts of justifications. I wanted to be in solidarity, but I didn’t want to lose this opportunity, and I thought there must be some way that I could have both.

Then I called my brother. He’s spent his entire career working in the humanitarian field. And he told me, “Emma, if it doesn’t hurt, it’s not solidarity. If no one’s giving something up, it’s meaningless.” Is that true? Does solidarity have to hurt?

Sarah Schulman: Is it true that solidarity has to hurt? No. But the idea that there will never be a cost is wrong. Increasingly, we’re seeing people getting fired, being arrested and censured for things they put on social media. So the risk is higher, and certainly you can lose access to power and opportunities, which is a big part of how people operate in the United States. But what you gain is internal coherence. Because we’re in a fascist cataclysm, and the only thing you can control is your integrity. That’s it.

Naomi R Williams: I would say that solidarity is risk, and it is loss. The steelworkers in Birmingham, Alabama, are an example of this. They’re trying to deal with the issue that Black workers have only recently been allowed to have union membership, but the union’s seniority clause says that workers who have been there the longest will get laid off last. How is that justified to Black workers who missed out on years of opportunity of building up seniority? They were always going to be fired first.

EP: What happened?

NW: When they were negotiating, the bargaining committee had to educate members to vote for a contract that would potentially make them lose their jobs. White union members actually voted to risk losing their jobs before Black workers would lose theirs, because Black workers had been excluded from even applying for those jobs and getting union membership in the first place. And so they created a scale that was equitable for everyone, but it really required that white workers take a chance that if the company downsized, they would lose their jobs. And they did. They signed it, and they implemented it. It became policy. That is a literal definition of affirmative action.

EP: Why did they do it?

NW: Those white workers had to understand themselves to be in solidarity with their brothers in the union, right? They had to understand what they were doing, to have critical engagement with the issue at hand, and be like, okay, are we going to make amends? What is this going to look like in writing in our agreement with the employers? Steelworkers did that. A lot of the packinghouse workers in Chicago, the garment workers . . . there are all these cases where workers in bargaining units had to take a risk or give up potential income to be in solidarity. The whole point of solidarity is giving something up! This isn’t my reference, but the sociologist Erik Olin Wright has used the song “Jolene” to talk about solidarity.

EP: “Jolene” is my childhood favorite song!

NW: Dolly [Parton] is saying, “Jolene . . . please don’t take my man.” You’re beautiful. You can have any man you want. Jolene has to make the decision, like, I can take Dolly’s man, but if I’m in solidarity, I won’t.

EP: Jolene has to sacrifice. But from a place of privilege, of incredible
beauty. You can have any man . . .

NW: Right, you can have any man you want.

EP: So sometimes you give one up . . . Oh, that is wonderful.

NW: Now you can go back and listen to “Jolene” again.

Internal coherence means trying to line up as a person with what we actually believe. It’s a search for unity between belief and action. To make sense to our own selves.

EP: Sarah, in your book The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity, you tell a story about collecting signatures to support the poet Dareen Tatour, who was arrested for posting her poem “Resist My People, Resist Them” on Facebook. And one prominent writer replied that they wanted to see the poem before deciding if they would sign the petition. You introduce this remarkable concept of criteria, which has really changed how I have been thinking about solidarity. Can you explain what criteria means in this context?

SS: The writer imagined that a person had to meet a criteria of content to be able to post a poem without being arrested. While I cannot imagine any poem that would justify arrest.

EP: I’ve had the experience lately, certainly with a lot of people in my life who have hedged around Israel and Palestine. When I think about those people, I have a lot of compassion for them, because I think they’re very afraid of being on the wrong side.

SS: The issue, a lot of it has to do with family, and I went into this in big detail in Conflict Is Not Abuse. The idea is that loyalty to family is falsely constructed as doing what they want or supporting them, or being on their side no matter what they do, and that relationship should take priority over other people.

But real love is helping people be self-critical and supporting them for it. The way it is now, somebody says, I think I contributed to the escalation of that problem. Then everyone else is like, Oh, well, then you
got what you deserved. Because the bar is very high for compassion. But the reality is, everyone deserves compassion. You shouldn’t have to be 100 percent purely innocent to get compassion. People are afraid that they can’t tolerate family or click disapproval. What could be in a poem posted on Facebook that you think should have a person incarcerated?

EP: Absolutely. I also can imagine being terrified that you are somehow
supporting armed resistance. I can imagine a person thinking, Oh, but
what if I am supporting something I don’t actually support, and I get
backlash, and I get canceled, and my events get canceled?

SS: And, well, that’s the thing that people are afraid of: that their access will be limited.

EP: To your point, maybe in that moment, that person was valuing their career safety over their integrity.

SS: There’s a burden on Palestinians. They’ve been positioned as dangerous when actually they are endangered. This is a paradigm I learned from people with AIDS. It was exactly the same: They were positioned as dangerous. People had their houses burned down because their kids were HIV-positive, when actually they were endangered and needed protection.

NW: Compassion is forcing us to deal with the fact that groups of people are being othered based on their identity, and so once they’re in that position of other, then suddenly we’re justified in causing them harm. If you’re othering whole groups of people based on their identity, then they don’t deserve to be free, they don’t deserve a living wage, they don’t deserve access, they don’t deserve rights, because they’re in this other position. Then that protects your humanity. Solidarity is understanding that that’s a lie. That all people, we’re all connected.

EP: Both of you bring to the conversation of solidarity a deeply researched historical perspective. Both of you have compiled significant collections of oral histories. Sarah, you are an AIDS historian, and Naomi, you are a labor researcher. Why is it so important that we look backward to be able to move forward?

NW: As a historian of working people in the United States, I center my research on oral histories, life histories of working people in particular communities, because I’m looking to answer questions of community. How do people come together? What are their identity-based politics or collective ideas of freedom and community and solidarity? What do those things mean to an individual or a group identity?

EP: I heard you on the New Books Network podcast talking about how we have forgotten the richness of our history around organizing and solidarity. Could you speak to that?

NW: We tend to think of things as novel, right? Especially if we’re coming from a position of, Oh, this is a moment of crisis, or, How did we get here? And, How do we imagine a different future?

But you don’t instinctively pause and look back, and if we don’t know our history, then we don’t know how to question the information we’re receiving. And right now, we’re being overloaded with information, and people are quite reactive, and understandably so. Because everything does feel so urgent, and people are literally afraid for their lives, are literally losing their lives. We are in this moment where we do need to come together, and we’ve been in this moment before. Certain communities have lived this for a very long time.

Higher education is under attack. Not in new ways, but very loudly, in terms of academic freedom. But there are some faculty who have always faced these types of attacks. You can see it with Palestine, right? You can have academic freedom, unless you’re supporting a free Palestine. So that’s not new. That’s not something that’s just happened. Scholars who study Palestine, Palestinian scholars themselves, have always been held to a different definition of academic freedom. Scholars who look at women and gender, who look at race, in particular, scholars of color have always been held to a different standard of academic freedom. How have they survived and dealt with those attacks? Those are lessons we need to be able to implement now. But if we don’t know that history, and if we haven’t been in community with those people and seeing their struggles and learning from it, then we’re re-creating the wheel, because we don’t understand what’s come before.

EP: Sarah, in your book, you look specifically at the history of the AIDS activism movement and break it down to pinpoint what made it effective, and we can learn from it. What is one key takeaway?

We’re not free, and those of us with more privilege, we’re trying to hold on to the little bit we have, as opposed to recognizing that we have more in common with people who are struggling.

SS: Movements need victories. The Left does things that don’t work. Then we do them again in exactly the same way, and they don’t work. There’s no point. It dissipates people’s energies, and it creates a sense of failure. When I started writing the history of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), I reread Dr. King’s 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” where he lays out his theory of direct action. It’s like you become the expert on your issue. You find a solution that is reasonable, winnable, and doable, and you propose it to the powers that be. When they say no, you do nonviolent, theatrical civil disobedience to telegraph through the media to the public that you have a reasonable solution.

Make demands you can win. It doesn’t mean you can win them tomorrow. For example, the demand to divest, for universities to divest. It’s completely winnable because they’ve already done it with South Africa, and some of them have already done it with fossil fuels, so there’s a historical precedent, and they know how to do it. You can’t win it tomorrow, but it’s a reasonable, winnable demand.

We live in a time where outrage and action have gotten kind of conflated because of online algorithms, and real-world effectiveness and online effectiveness can get a little bit blurred in our brains.

EP: Can you speak about the tension between outrage and action? Are they in conflict?

SS: It’s not one or the other. Sometimes you just need to yell and scream. Some of ACT UP’s actions didn’t accomplish anything, like throwing people’s ashes on the White House lawn. But they expressed something that people needed to express so that they could go on.

EP: But it’s not to be confused with effectiveness?

SS: The thing that helps movements is to have campaigns. And campaigns mean you have a winnable demand, yeah? And you do actions toward winning that demand. So all your actions are linked to something concrete. The worst thing is to make everybody march around in the rain, and then they stand in the rain, and they listen to speakers tell them things they already know, and then they go home. It doesn’t help anybody, because it’s not linked to any outcome.

EP: Earlier you said that all we can control is our own integrity and our own internal coherence. Can you explain that concept?

SS: In situations where we do not have the external power, we each have some degree of internal power. Internal coherence means trying to line up as a person with what we actually believe. It’s a search for unity between belief and action. To make sense to our own selves.

EP: I have so many friends who say that they can’t get involved in activism or hear anything about Palestine because it’s too hard on their mental health. And it’s almost like you’re saying the opposite, that our mental health depends on our involvement in activism or our willingness to speak up about Palestine or whatever, because our integrity is all we have.

SS: For some people, there’s only certain things they can do. There used to be a girl in ACT UP who worked at a Xerox store, and what she could do was free Xerox. That was it, but it made a difference. Some people could do bookkeeping. People can only be where they’re at, and that’s really hard to accept. But if your movement accepts that, and doesn’t ask for everyone to agree on strategy, or everyone to do the same, to have the same analysis, then your friends who are limited can do something.

EP: I’m guessing you probably would not consider Instagram activism, like reposting something about Palestine.

SS: It depends on to whom and what the consequence is. Like I said,
people get arrested because of what they put on their social media.

NW: True solidarity comes with a responsibility. It’s like posting signs saying BLACK LIVES MATTER but refusing to speak up about a policy that adversely impacts Black people in the United States. When I do that, I’m creating an image of what I say, but I’m not actually engaging with the problems and coming up with solutions. Real solidarity is coming up with solutions and then implementing them. Are you going to put a sign in your yard or are you going to participate in community mutual aid to protect your neighbors from being kidnapped? At whatever level you can. Who are you talking to? Who are you advocating for? Are you using your networks and your influences?

EP: There’s a conception of solidarity that is kind of kumbaya—put our differences aside and just work together. And in different ways, both of you are trying to deepen and widen the conversation around that.

SS: For me, radical democracy is the acceptance of difference with a bottom line. But I also recognize that each person has their own bottom line when they do the work to cohere that.

NW: When we try to pretend that our differences don’t matter, we struggle to mobilize in large numbers and to have any sort of cohesiveness to a movement. Because we don’t know our history and we don’t understand how [mobilizing] has worked for us, we don’t consider it as an option, and we’re playing it safe. So instead of playing it safe, why not center the needs of the most vulnerable among us and see if that’s a path to true democracy and true freedom?

Right now, too few of us can make what I would call independent choices based on our own wants, because we’re constrained by a system where people work full-time jobs and aren’t able to afford housing and food and medical expenses, let alone entertainment and relaxation. Too many people work too long and too hard for too little. We’re not free, and those of us with more privilege, we’re trying to hold on to the little bit we have, as opposed to recognizing that we have more in common with people who are struggling. When we can come together in solidarity and recognize that some people need more than we need, I think that opens the door to creative ways to leverage our power. If we really mean that we want to live in a democracy, and we want people to have agency over their lives, then we have to come together. The people for the people; it has to literally mean something.